Ballad of 9:33 p.m.
What if i gave the cat champagne i’m tired of reading Catullus i have a buddy in Arizona with a mail order bride i’ve never even met maybe i should go there we had dinner tonight with the Friedhoffs who my wife calls the Fried Chickens but not to their faces Tammy Friedhoff says jorts are back in style i wrote this down in my journal next to a quote from Simone Weil before my wife was my wife we’d hike the Catskills in search of the nearest bar stunning in matching cowboy shirts those days won’t come back but at least we don’t have to talk in complete sentences now there’s that sometimes we just sit on folding chairs and don’t say a word we each have a vote though silence is a vote for more silence
Poem for the night before the first day of school
My sister in Christ remember the summers you’d show up at the beach a men’s long sleeve shirt over your swimsuit and my aunts would say that was to hide your track marks but i still followed you to the thicket behind the levee you were smoking a joint with one hand massaging your dog’s head with the other Herman Melville has the bluest eyes you said as if he was waiting behind a tree for us and the river ready to be a metaphor for anything why not our lives muddy but sacred and let me do the talking you said explain everything to the most beautiful Messiah how we tried but it’s hard to be still in parked cars we couldn’t help ourselves like i was destined to flunk out of school and you had to go back to the hospital so now when football weather comes and all the cool kids are reading Hegel i light votive candles from the bodega the ones that are supposed to bring me money keep the police away and grieve alone for a moment i put on a sweater from back in the day the one full of holes
JUSTIN LACOUR lives in New Orleans with his wife and three children, and edits Trampoline. His first full-length collection, A Season in Heck & Other Poems, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press.